Jenny Grace Makholm

Activist & Advocate

Actors and Writers and Now, Congressional Lobbyists

Arts workers are building a labor movement to save a creative economy in peril

Performing Arts Reps Warn House Hearing Not To Let “Creative Infrastructure Of Our Economy Vanish”

In 2020, COVID-19 shut down the United States’ Arts & Culture sector almost overnight. Within a few days in March of 2020, live events, performing arts, and cultural institutions across the country shuttered, instantly leaving millions of American Arts Workers unemployed.

When it became clear that the CARES Act did not adequately address the size and scope of the disaster facing the Arts & Culture sector, four determined Arts Workers, Brooke Ishibashi, Carson Elrod, Jenny Grace Makholm & Matthew-Lee Erlbach founded the Be An #ArtsHero campaign, working alongside hundreds of volunteers around the clock to build coalitions, harness celebrity platforms, start viral social media campaigns, and most importantly, lobby Congress to immediately stabilize the Arts & Culture sector and the millions of newly unemployed Arts Workers.

Since June of 2020, Be An #ArtsHero has become one of the most nationally recognized Arts Advocacy campaigns in American history. The Be An #ArtsHero campaign has engaged in dozens of successful social media campaigns that have achieved virality, spreading Arts Advocacy to a new generation, and bringing the term “Arts Worker '' into the common vernacular.
The four founders and their powerful Arts advocacy message have been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, Forbes, New York Magazine, and dozens of other publications. The campaign has been represented on television by Billy Porter, B.D. Wong, Philippa Soo, Jeremy O Harris, and Jane Krakowski and amplified on social media by the likes of Ariana DeBose, Cher, Alfre Woodward, Bette Midler, and Hillary Clinton.

Since 2020, Be An #ArtsHero campaign has grown from a viral hashtag movement into a visionary new non-profit 501c4 Social Welfare Organization called Arts Workers United.